DRYER VENT WIZARD

Do you know whether the policy in your file would actually protect what you built — or just satisfy the form your franchisor asked for? Those are two different things.

Here is the moment most Dryer Vent Wizard owners never plan for. A customer's dryer overheats and catches fire 60 days after your technician cleaned the vent. The fire marshal blames lint buildup. The customer's lawyer argues your cleaning was inadequate. Your work is finished, your invoice is paid, and now the claim lands on the work you already walked away from.

You cleaned a fire hazard out of that home. That is the service. It is also the exposure. A claim tied to a fire after the job is not a job-site accident — it is a completed-operations dispute, and it surfaces months after the truck leaves.

You drained savings and signed a personal guarantee to open this location. The franchise agreement tells you what to carry to satisfy Dryer Vent Wizard SPV LLC. That is the floor. Here is where the requirement ends before your real risk does.

Your franchise agreement is the entry point. Dryer Vent Wizard SPV LLC sets a minimum stack you must carry before you open, and your certificate of insurance must prove it.

General liability is the core. General liability, or GL, pays when your work causes bodily injury or property damage to someone else. The FDD requires $1,000,000 per occurrence, which is the most the policy pays for one claim, and $2,000,000 in the aggregate, which is the most it pays in a policy year. That GL must include products and completed operations — coverage for claims that arise after a job is done — and personal and advertising injury.

You also must carry commercial auto, workers' compensation, cyber liability, and crime coverage. The franchisor, its parents, and affiliates must be named as an additional insured, meaning they get protection under your policy too. Your policy must include a waiver of subrogation, which stops your insurer from later suing the franchisor, and it must be primary and non-contributory, meaning your policy pays first. The carrier must hold an A.M. Best rating of A-VIII or better. A.M. Best rates an insurer's financial strength.

That satisfies your franchisor. Below is the exact compliance box, then the protection question that matters more.

This is the exposure that defines your trade. You remove a fire hazard for a living. When a fire happens later, the cause becomes a question — and the question lands on you.

Picture a small commercial laundry that hires you to service its vents. Six weeks later a dryer overheats and a fire causes $180,000 in building and equipment damage. The owner's insurer pays the loss, then comes after you, arguing your cleaning missed packed lint in a transition duct. Your general liability responds because this is products and completed operations — bodily injury or property damage from work already finished. That is why the FDD requires completed operations inside the GL limit. If your policy quietly dropped completed operations to lower the premium, this is the claim that exposes the gap, and a $180,000 fire loss can erase years of profit on one territory.

When you sub out overflow jobs to a 1099 crew during peak season, confirm your GL includes independent contractors liability so a sub's work is covered too. One endorsement, often little or no added cost, prevents a denied claim on work you did not perform yourself.

Most owners start residential and grow into recurring commercial vent contracts. That growth is where coverage and opportunity collide.

A regional property manager invites you to bid annual vent service across 40 apartment buildings. The contract is worth real recurring revenue. Then the certificate of insurance requirements arrive: $2,000,000 per occurrence, the property manager named as an additional insured on a completed-operations basis, and a waiver of subrogation. Your policy shows $1,000,000 per occurrence with the franchisor endorsement only. You cannot produce the certificate, so you lose the account to a competitor whose policy was built for commercial work. The franchisor minimum satisfied Dryer Vent Wizard SPV LLC. It did not satisfy the first client who could meaningfully grow your business. Before bidding commercial work, ask your agent to confirm your policy can issue the certificate the contract demands — usually a limit increase or an umbrella layer costing a few hundred to a few thousand dollars a year, far less than the account is worth.

Your service is not curbside. Your technician enters homes, reaches behind appliances, and moves through attics and crawlspaces to trace vent runs. That access creates property-damage exposure on the spot.

Say a technician pulls a dryer to reach the vent and the unit gouges a hardwood floor, then a misstep in the attic cracks a ceiling below. Repairs total $9,500. Your general liability pays this as bodily injury or property damage at the customer's premises during ongoing operations. This is the everyday claim GL is built for, and it is why the FDD requires GL before anything else. The trap is a policy with a low sublimit on damage to property in your care or a high deductible you cannot fund mid-job. Read your declarations page and confirm the property-damage limit matches the homes you actually work in, not a generic small-business default.

Your team is alone inside customers' homes and laundry areas, and you collect payment in the field. That is exactly the exposure the FDD's crime requirement addresses.

A homeowner reports that jewelry vanished from a bedroom the same week your technician serviced the dryer vent in the adjacent laundry room. The customer files a theft claim for $14,000. Standard crime coverage that only protects your own property would not respond — the loss is the customer's property inside the customer's home. The FDD requires a Client's Property Endorsement, which extends crime coverage to a customer's property, precisely because this is the home-services exposure. The FDD sets that endorsement at $5,000, which is a floor, not a ceiling. Confirm the endorsement is present and consider a higher limit, since a single theft allegation can run well past $5,000.

Two of your biggest lines — general liability and workers' compensation — are both auditable. The premium you pay at the start is an estimate. The real number is trued up at year-end. Most owners learn this only when the audit bill arrives.

General liability for a contractor is usually rated on revenue, charged per $1,000 of sales, though some carriers use payroll or add subcontractor payments to the base. An audit is the carrier's year-end review that compares the revenue you estimated against what you actually did, then adjusts the premium up or down. Suppose you estimate $200,000 in revenue and finish the year at $360,000 — a $160,000 difference. At roughly $7 per $1,000 of revenue, the audit adds about $1,120 (160 × $7), billed as a lump sum a few months after the year ends.

Workers' compensation works differently. The formula is payroll divided by 100, times the state rate for your class code, times your experience modification. The per-$100 rate is set by your state's rating bureau, not the carrier — the insurer applies the bureau's rate and runs its own year-end payroll audit. If you classify a technician under the wrong code, that is an audit adjustment at year-end, not a denied claim. Across the full stack — GL, auto, WC, cyber, crime, and tools — expect roughly $9,000 to $16,000 a year for a single territory with two or three vans and a small crew. Note that FDD Item 7 estimates often understate insurance once vans, payroll, and elevated work are added.

The practical move is to estimate revenue and payroll close to reality, and if the business grows fast mid-year, ask the carrier for a mid-term adjustment. Spreading the increase across remaining installments avoids one large surprise bill. An audit is reconciliation, not a penalty — overestimate and you get money back.

Rikor's recommendations are calibrated to your operational profile — revenue, payroll, subcontractor spend, years in business, and how much commercial work you do. The numbers below are baselines for newer franchisees and scale up as the business grows.

The FDD requires cyber liability at $500,000 per claim, which already exceeds the $250,000 baseline Rikor recommends for a first-year operator with a booking platform and stored payment data. That is a case where the franchisor minimum is the stronger position — keep it.

Contractors E&O is worth a hard look even though your work is physical. Errors and omissions coverage responds to financial loss a customer suffers from a professional error. When a customer alleges your cleaning was inadequate and a later fire was your fault, the dispute can include both property damage and pure financial loss. Rikor's baseline is $1,000,000 per claim and aggregate, exposure-gated to how much commercial vent work you take on. Confirm any faulty-workmanship piece is not removed by endorsement before you rely on it.

Inland marine covers your tools and equipment wherever they travel — in the van, at a job site, or stolen overnight. Standard property coverage stops at a fixed location and does not follow your equipment. Size this to the actual replacement value of your vacuum systems, cameras, and rods rather than a round number.

For commercial crime, Rikor's baseline is $250,000 with a third-party crime endorsement on a loss-discovered form, which covers theft you discover during the policy period even if it happened earlier. The FDD's $5,000 client-property floor is thin against a real theft allegation.

On umbrella, reason from your worst realistic loss. A dryer-fire claim at a multi-unit commercial laundry can run into the high six figures and blow through a $1,000,000 GL limit. As you add commercial accounts that require $2,000,000 or $5,000,000 certificates, an umbrella becomes the layer that keeps one large fire loss from exceeding your primary stack. For owners still doing mostly single-family homes, the better first spend is making the primary GL, completed operations, and crime right.

Business interruption is generally not recommended for a van-based operation like yours. If your tools are lost, you can replace them quickly and keep working — there is no storefront to shut down.